Sylvia Plath is one of the main poets of the Feminism. << She was born in 1932 in Massachusetts to a first generation Ploish-American father and a second-generation Austrian-American mother. She wrote poetry, fiction, and children's literature. (…) Her poetry, much of which focuses on discovering, recognizing, and dramatizing the self, sometimes acknowledges and sometimes evades a mindfulness about the privileges associated with a self embodied in whiteness. (…) Plath understands enough about her whiteness as a privilege to market it as a sexual commodity. She markets herself as white, and yet interestingly, she modifies her whiteness into a “colourful” one (Journals 77). Such modification signifies as an understanding of whiteness-and its associated purity, cleanliness, and virtuousness-as which depicts whiteness as sexually lacking in regard to love and sexuality. This scenario, which depicts whiteness as sexually lacking and colourfulness or darkness as sexually fulfilling or excessive, occurs repeatedly throughout her poetry. (…) In the poems written from 1956 to 1959, Plath interrogates the power transformations that might occur should we view the world through a black gaze rather than a white one. (…) The early poems also demonstrate an obsessive repetition of the black/ white binary. Plath's early work is replete with such shadows. (…) In “Conversation Among the Ruins” (1956), Plath associates the word “black” with the power of initiating change in language:>> (White Women writing white.)

<<While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit

Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,

Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:

With such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?>>

(Collected Poems 21)

Plath is a white writer who, wittingly and unwittingly, constructs images of white mastery, dominance, hierarchy, and privilege throughout her works. But it is only an example of one kind of feminist poetry and it does not mean that all the feminist poetry is the same that this one, but it has similarities. Because Feminism has a lot of characteristics and not all the works concerning it have all the characteristics, only some of them. And another of Plath's poems is A Life, from the work Ariel. << Ariel is the second book of Sylvia Plath 's poetry to be published, in 1965, two years after her death by suicide; most of the poems included in it had been selected by her. It has been the cause of much controversy among feminist critics. At the time of Plath's death, she left a nearly completed manuscript entitled Ariel and Other Poems .>>

(http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Ariel_%28Plath%29)

The case of Sylvia Plath was that her father died when she was eight, after her father's leg had to be amputated after he developed gangrene. Then he spent the rest of his days in the hospital. After that, Plath said <<I'll never speak to God again>>. This was a kind of hatred towards God because “He had to take away her father”. Sylvia expresses how she feels because of her father's death in her poem A Life . First she talks about how she felt in the past, when she was sad and crying, in the first stanza; then she explains people are too busy to bother about their problems, in the second stanza; but in the third stanza she tries to feel god with Nature: with water “sea” (line 11), “air” (line 15) and ground “paradeground” (line 14). She feels hatred towards God because He allowed her father to die. Then she feels there is no light where she lives, instead of it there is darkness in the fifth stanza in “light falls” (line 20). In the sixth stanza Plath tells how she felt when her father was in the hospital, “a woman is dragging her shadow” (line 21) she says “she lives quietly” (line 25) because she does not say she feels bad. In the seventh stanza she feels alone “leave her alone now” (line 30). And she feels her future is grey and dark in the eighth stanza “the future is grey seagull” (line 31) and because she talks about “terror” (line 33) and “drowned man” (line 34).

  •  White Women writing white: H:D:, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness / Renée R. Curry. GREENWOOD PRESS, 2000

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